HR Transformation: Find Your Fit
I designed and launched a revolutionary mobile-first application for entry-level candidates at a $12 billion life sciences company. This application significantly informed and shaped their hiring process and digital hiring strategy for years to come.
Role
UX Lead
End Users
Potential Entry-Level Employees
Project Duration
12 Months+
Responsibilities:
Product Mangement
Research + Discovery
Usability Testing
Design
Introduction
About Charles River Laboratories:
Charles River Laboratories is a contract research organization (CRO) that provides products and services to accelerate drug discovery and development. Charles River's services are used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, government agencies, and academic institutions.
The Problem:
With a workforce of more than 18,000 employees, which is projected to double in approximately five years, a significant portion of these positions are entry-level roles. These roles encompass various responsibilities, ranging from cage washing to animal husbandry.
Presently, Charles River Laboratories (CRL) faces competition from companies like Amazon and Target that offer low-barrier-to-entry jobs with established brand recognition, employee benefits, and multiple locations, allowing them to capture a sizable share of the market.
To manage the high number of open entry-level positions and reduce employee turnover, CRL must hire entry-level workers in both large quantities and high quality. However, the current careers portal doesn't offer value to the entry-level worker and has major usability issues.
The Solution:
Based on our research and insights into the target audience, we developed a dedicated mobile-first application that serves as both a job search tool and a guided job matching resource, tailored for users less familiar with careers in the life sciences.
Pre-Discovery
IMAGES FROM CHARLES RIVER'S CURRENT CAREERS PORTALAnalyzing the Current State - Charles River’s Current Careers Portal
The major pain points of current careers portal and application journey include:
Jobs.Criver.com is not optimize for mobile, tablet or responsive desktop
The portal contains accessibility, functional and usability issues
The jobs descriptions listed on the portal contain verbose and confusing language using technical science terms and jargon
There are no clear value propositions to prospective employee and espically entry-level employees
Discovery
Voice of Customer Interviews
Recruiters
We interviewed 4 recruiters working in different business units across various Charles River sites, who are part of the Talent Acquisition team, to gain a comprehensive understanding of their experience.
Recent entry-level hires
We interviewed 9 newly hired entry-level employees who had been with the company for less than 2 months, to ensure that their experiences of being hired were still fresh in their memory.
Stakeholders and Business Partners
We interviewed several key stakeholders, including our Executive Director of Talent Acquisition, Chief People Officer, and Head of Digital Transformation, to gain a deeper understanding of the problem area.
“
I have people from Jiffy Lube applying to technician roles because they're a technician.”
- NANCY BURKE, RECRUITER, TALENT ACQUISITIONRecruiters - Pain points
High turnover rate / ghosting
According to recruiters, some employees either leave within the first few weeks or withdraw from the hiring process altogether because their actual job experience falls short of their expectations, based on the job description.
Competition from bigger companies
CRL faces tough competition from well-known companies such as Target and Amazon, which already have efficient processes in place to swiftly hire entry-level employees.
Hiring process takes too long
CRL may take over two months to fill a position, while competitors can do so in under a week.
“
They said I would have to do surgical procedures on the animals and what they really meant was I would just have to do identification earmarks. I was concerned about that cause I don't have experience in surgery on animals”
- RECENT ENTRY-LEVEL HIRERecent Hires - Pain points
Job description comprehension
Employees didn’t understand a lot the technical terms and were confused and unclear about the actual duties of the job position.
Clunky application process
The application uploader didn’t work as intended forcing users to manually input details and work history causing user error and abandonment.
Outdated experience
The careers portal not only lacked mobile optimization but also had broken core features like the job search. The overall appearance and experience felt outdated, failing to generate any enthusiasm for a career at CRL.
Problem Definition
The challenge of comprehending, recognizing, and applying for job positions at Charles River poses a problem for entry-level workers, hindering the retention and recruitment of quality talent.
To fill the abundant entry-level positions and minimize the turnover rate, Charles River must hire a significant number of entry-level employees with the right qualifications.
However, the current approach is failing to meet the users' needs, limiting CRL's ability to attract the necessary workforce. This, in turn, leads to frequent turnover and vacant job positions.
How might we increase the quantity and quality of applicants to entry-level roles at Charles River and reduce time-to-hire?
Ideation
EXAMPLES OF APPS AND WEBSITES DEDICATED TO JOB SEARCHES.Concept One: Optimizing for Mobile
All of our users start own mobile devices, while some consider their mobile device their primary device. They often start their job search from web or native apps such as Indeed or Montster.com
EXAMPLES OF APPS AND WEBSITES DEDICATED TO JOB MATCHING.Concept Two: Job Matching
One persona has a life sciences background, while the other doesn't. The latter group needs guidance in their job search, as they are less familiar with suitable opportunities. To help them, a guided job search process with targeted questions is necessary to find the best-fit job.
EXAMPLES OF APPS AND WEBSITES DEDICATED TO JOB MATCHING.Concept Three: Job Clarity
Help users understand what the job is about. Since most employees lacked a scientific background, they struggled to comprehend the job descriptions. To overcome this challenge, we had to rephrase the descriptions in human terms and highlight the benefits, pay, and career growth opportunities that CRL offered.
Solution
“Find your Fit” is a mobile optimized web application that provides an enhanced candidate experience to easily find and understand entry-level opportunities:
Aims to reduce the time to fill a job to save the recruiter time, improve the candidate experience, and place the candidates quicker
Expected to increase the pipeline of available and qualified talent who understand the requirements and aspects of the job
Designed to delight candidates for the best possible experience, which should lead to engaged new hires when they come through the door
Your can view the application functionality at https://findyourfit.criver.com/
User Testing
MODERATED USER TESTING THE TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC AT AUSTIN COMMUNITY COLLEGEWe used an online testing tool called Maze.com for unmoderated use cases, and we did informal user testing with students from Austin Community College. Some major themes include:
Branding and Trust
Users are confused about who/ what is providing the job finding services.
Product Market Fit
Order of CTA's on home page needs to be reordered, reprioritized.
Context & Clarity
Job Matcher questions are unclear in content and unclear in results.
Launch, Legacy and Impact
Several months after the Find Your Fit launch, as leadership contemplated refreshing the careers site, we reached a critical juncture where a decision about the app's future had to be made. I took charge of leading the group through a workshop, presenting three potential avenues for consideration:
We take a serious look at using Find Your Fit as the basis for the careers site from a tech and design standpoint.
We use Find Your Fit as a testing ground to test out high value/ high cost features such as Chatbot, focus on content, etc.
Keep Find Your Fit as is, with incremental updates and monitoring until it becomes obsolete. We take learnings so far from Find Your Fit into the build of the new careers site.
With the help of a prioritization workshop, the team felt that it would be most valuable to sunset Find Your Fit, but take the learnings to help inform the direction of the new careers site.
EXCERPT FROM DISCOVERY READOUT FOR REDESIGNED CAREERS SITE WITH DATA AND FINDINGS FROM FIND YOUR FITCOMPLETE CASE STUDY FOR FIND YOUR FITImpact
Despite the app being discontinued shortly after its launch, pivotal insights gleaned from our research and user testing, particularly concerning content clarity and the candidate journey, were incorporated into the redesign of our primary careers website.